


Still Life with Goshawk

by jouissant



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Birds, Christmas, M/M, Miscommunication, Post-Canon, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, loveable misanthrope Francis Crozier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22086109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Francis had three invitations for Christmas, all of which he declined.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 31
Kudos: 205
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	Still Life with Goshawk

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to what-alchemy for beta help and general sprucing up. 
> 
> Idk if the Rosses even had kids but enjoy this AU where they had some and they all loved their Uncle Frauncis very much. 
> 
> For my Terror Bingo "miscommunication" square.

In the years since the unillustrious return of Franklin’s expedition Francis faded steadily from public life, a bid for anonymity that had been startlingly successful. He purchased a small stone cottage near enough to London that nobody grumbled but far enough to forget the place existed most of the time. The house was a scant mile across fields from a little nothing of a village. He had a garden patch and apple trees, and an expanding library. He let his acreage to a shepherd whose son he imagined was out with the ewes even now in deepest winter, crammed in their shelter, smelling of sweet hay and lanolin. There was a stable in which the shepherd’s son kept a malevolent spotted pony. Francis had no dog, but he was partial to the collie who slunk among the sheep, and often slipped her his soup bones. He had a housekeeper who came on Mondays and Fridays and brought him a covered basket full of uncommonly good things with which to stock his larder: meat pies and jam tarts, jars of pickled vegetables. 

Francis lived a good life. Full as he liked it, often solitary, and far better than he might once have imagined. He had written copiously from _Terror_ as it sped west across the berg-choked North Atlantic, pained and lonesome words from a man who had grasped at a sort of companionship he believed he wanted more than anything else. He was not ashamed to admit, having come out the other side of that frozen hell, he could no longer locate that man within himself. Francis wanted warmth and comfort, both physical and psychological. He could be apart from either, but not for one second longer than he expressly wished. He had devolved into an eccentric. He wore his coat and hat indoors at the faintest hint of chill, and he left dinners before the second course if he was having anything less than a fine time. He made no bones about these peculiarities, and he bid his friends make no excuses.

* * *

Francis had three invitations for Christmas, all of which he declined. The first was a formality, and he dispensed with his regrets to Sophia immediately. The second—well, he did love James Ross, and he loved the man’s better half, Ann, who so accommodated him. But living in the country Francis had only just wrested sleep back from whichever peevish god held it hostage after his return from the Arctic, and he would not lose it again at the hands of the Ross offspring. Regrets again, and he would see them in the new year.

The third invitation came late, and presented a considerably greater problem for Francis.

_Dear Francis,_

_I hope this letter finds you in good health. I myself have come down with an abominable cold and daresay am at risk of losing my very life. You will say I ought not to joke about it, and I will say I suppose you are right. Only tell it to this blasted catarrh, which caulks my nose and stops me breathing. Is it not funny how quickly we soften, we who grew such hard rinds? But enough about my cold (have I mentioned it is undoubtedly the worst cold with which I have ever had the ill fortune to be afflicted?) I write to extend an invitation, should you be without a prior engagement. Christmas 1850 we had a fine time the two of us at the Coninghams’ in Sandborn Place, Brighton. I will be there from 20th Dec. (to-morrow) and would request the pleasure of your company, should you see fit to disengage yourself from country life and if the picture of me red-nosed and sneezing has not put you off. Please write directly, c/o William and Elizabeth C. and pray for me that I do not expire on the journey. Should I come through I promise you an orange down the toe of your stocking and shall remain,_

_As ever,  
Your friend,  
James Fitzjames_

Francis had frowned at the letter for a long time. He frowned at the return address, stamped on the envelope specially, a very fashionable street in Mayfair such as befitted a society man, lately of Her Majesty’s Discovery Service. He frowned doubly at his own name in James’s loopy hand, and wondered at what had spurred the man to write him with such a ridiculous invitation.

Francis had not been strictly estranged from James, no more so than any survivor of the expedition. One lost touch, didn’t one, as the years built upon each other? Most of the men had been reabsorbed by the Navy; he’d had letters in the intervening years from Jopson and from Little, who had since made captain. Thomas Blanky he would find in a hole in the wall in the East End, if ever he were to go looking. And James—well. Lately, Francis found he heard far too much of James. Chiefly that he was penning a memoir, which he announced at a society party in the spring to much feting, many hear-hears and much popping of corks. 

Francis was not present, of course; he heard a few weeks later from Ross, who made a special journey to Sussex to break the news as they tromped about along the hedgerow, where Francis could startle none but dormice and sparrows with the resultant outburst. He had been unprepared for how the idea of the memoir would shake him. He had attended Sophia’s wedding, for God’s sake, had clasped her hand in the receiving line and wished her well and meant it. Yet the mere mention of James’s book--a book not yet published—made him feel, ridiculously, as though he had been betrayed.

“Why does it distress you so?” Ross asked, in response to his persistent grumblings. “Fitzjames hardly invented the memoir. Any man may write one, and every man has! Yours, should you produce it, would be just as well received.”

“I have no desire to write a memoir. I would sooner drop dead where I stand.”

Ross clapped Francis on the back. “Take care,” he laughed. “Or that shall be the end of your chapter.”

Francis could not imagine James sitting down with ink and quill to write about him. At times Francis was seized by shivers down his spine, and feared the writing was occurring at that very moment, James miles away in London sitting hunched at his desk, attempting to put Francis into words. He felt awfully regarded then, and could not recover until he was in bed in the dark, quilt pulled up to his chin. He imagined James’s gaze as somehow omniscient, as though Francis might throw open the curtains in the morning and meet James’s roving eye.

Perhaps the invitation, then, was related to the memoir. That must be so, Francis thought, brain warming to the suggestion like milk curdling in a pan. James must require his input on some detail of the expedition, and thus sought to ply him with festivities. If he imagined this would work, then he had forgotten everything he once knew about Francis. The character he sketched in the book would bear only a passing resemblance. Francis shook his head and sat down at his own desk to compose a reply, but he found himself poised, pen in hand, with no notion at all of what to write. He occupied himself by addressing an envelope to James in care of the Coninghams. He was inclined to dash off some curt missive, yet when he reread James’s note he found it very jocular, and felt compelled to respond in kind.

 _You are awfully hard on him,_ said Ross in his head, speaking from that day in the hedgerow. _You two got on so famously for a time. After._

Aye, after.

The trouble, thought Francis, was after _that_.

At last, he began the letter. As he did, he tried to muster good humour. If he cast his mind back lo these past five years he could recall the Christmas James spoke of: 1850, when the two of them still felt like men apart, still clung to one another in a way that embarrassed Francis even as some part of him ached to think of it. James had been so melancholy that winter. He had fairly begged Francis to go with him to Brighton. _I shall pack for you myself,_ he said, covering his gloom over with imperiousness. _James Ross can miss you for one year, Francis. Come with me._

And he had. They had had a lovely time.

_James,_ he wrote, _I trust that you have survived your trek to darkest Brighton and that your nose has been uncaulked. I cannot abide the woebegone exchange of ailments that dogs a man’s discourse as he ages, thus I will not trouble you with such save to say I am well enough. I would be pleased to join you at Christmas_ —

From here he meant to launch into the Buts or the Howevers. Before he could set pen to paper again, though, a splintering of glass rang out from the direction of the kitchen, followed by wild flapping and a series of great crashes. Francis dropped his pen, sparing no further thought for the letter, for the splatter of ink. His first feeling was fear—one could not quite escape it, the thought that one was here within one’s ship and might be assailed from without by God-knew-what with teeth, with claws. But he blinked against the tunneling of his vision and forced himself up. You are retired and here in Sussex, he thought to himself, where the worst danger is slipping on a cowpat. He wrested himself into motion and made haste to the source of the sound, coming around the corner into the scullery to find a rather bemused goshawk, sitting stunned in the midst of a hail of demolished crockery.

“Good lord,” said Francis to the hawk. It did not reply.

When he advanced on it, it beat its wings threateningly and launched itself past him into the kitchen proper. The window above the basin was shattered where it had broken in, perhaps diving after a songbird and becoming disorientated by its own reflection in the pane. The hawk perched on the edge of the basin, scrabbling for purchase, wings akimbo. When he approached again it hopped onto the table at the center of the room. Up close the feathers were beautiful, a fine geometry of cream and grey. Several of them had become dissociated from the hawk and drifted slowly about the kitchen. Francis stood in the doorway. The hawk remained on the table. They regarded one another with a jaundiced wariness. The hawk looked resigned to its own death at Francis’s hands, and he felt sorry for it, wished he could tell it that this was not what he intended.

“Look here,” said Francis. “I cannot have a goshawk living in the kitchen. Mrs. Brown would be beside herself.”

The housekeeper reminded him of Jopson, all brusque yet genteel industry. He imagined she too could be doting in a crisis, if a sickbed needed tending. Francis never planned to find this out. He thought if he ever took seriously ill again he would slink off to die in private, with none but wild creatures to mourn him. The goshawk had survived its journey through the glass, and if it was to die, Francis would have nothing to do with it.

He went into the sitting room and cast about for something to toss over the hawk to subdue it. He found only the woolen blanket Ann Ross had made him, which he kept draped on the armchair nearest the fire. He fingered the stitches and grimaced at the thought of them made mincemeat by the goshawk’s talons. No, this would not do. He replaced the blanket and went out into the front hall, where he kept a brass coat-rack hung with a Mackintosh, a fine wool coat, and his faintly moth-eaten uniform greatcoat, not the precise version with which he had left Greenhithe all those years ago but a near cousin of it, being given to him by James Ross when he met Francis at the mouth of Back’s Fish River, where he had wrapped the coat around Francis’s thinned shoulders and sobbed into his neck. Well, this would not be the first battered creature the coat had seen. He extracted it from the rack and held it up by the shoulders.

He meant to make a sort of net with which to ensnare the hawk, to toss the coat and himself over top of it and wrestle it out of the door. But when Francis came back into the kitchen, the bird launched itself at him. It seemed to have discerned what he planned to do, and was instead determined to go out on its own terms and damn the consequences.

“Christ!” exclaimed Francis, and opened wide the coat. 

The hawk flew straight into it with more force than Francis would have expected, nearly sending him toppling backwards. Had this happened Francis did not know what he would have done. Most likely kept the Godforsaken thing in his house forever, as a sort of dubious mascot. But as it was he caught it, closed the coat around it without even thinking, by sheer instinct. Within the space of a blink Francis found himself standing in the kitchen clutching the great sack of the reconfigured greatcoat while the hawk fluttered and struggled within. It made no sound, having perhaps deemed the circumstances unworthy. Francis was faintly disappointed. He thought he might have liked to hear a goshawk’s call up close.

“Right, then. Out with you,” Francis said.

He carried hawk and coat through the house and straight out the front door, where he stood in the garden and contemplated the release. He thought the hawk might spring out of its confinement with some violence. He had better get well away from the windows lest the whole comedy repeat itself. He walked out beyond the gate and turned his back to the cottage, looked out over the hills to the south, where one could see a scrap of sea on a clear day, just a glint of sun on water, as though there were a diamond set in the horizon. Today the hills were brown and grey, a pewter sky pressing down against them. Francis could smell snow. He spread his arms and opened the coat. For a split second nothing seemed to happen, and he thought wildly that the hawk had disappeared by some pastoral magic. But then it burst forth, wings churning. It hung in the air before Francis for a moment, and as it did he swore it looked him in the eye. Then it beat away from him and alighted at the top of a skeletal beech tree. Francis stood and watched it until he began to feel ridiculous, standing out of doors, holding a coat, watching a bird. But after he went back inside he could not shake free the feeling that something had happened, though he did not know precisely what.

He did not think of James’s invitation again that afternoon, as he patched the window and set the kitchen to rights. The following day was a Friday, and when Mrs. Brown asked had he anything to go in the post he was absorbed in a novel and waved at the small stack of correspondence on top of his desk. If the housekeeper matched a letter’s salutation with its addressee, sealed it up and stamped and mailed it, Francis was none the wiser. He paused later in the afternoon, feeling startled. He sat staring into the fire for a moment—had he forgotten something, made some misstep? But the feeling passed. He saw the hawk again in the days that followed, coursing over the fields behind the cottage. He wished it well. He knew the hunting must be poor this time of year.

* * *

Christmas Day came quickly enough, and with it blessed quiet, more so even than was usual, for the shepherd came out well before dawn to tend the sheep and feed the pony. Even the strident bark of the collie dog came too early to rouse Francis, who woke late and fried himself several rashers of bacon, feeling rather handy as he did so. He ate his bacon and drank his tea beside the fire, and then he read and dozed, and read some more, and made himself some more bacon, which he ate with a currant bun from the batch Mrs. Brown had made. This was what he wanted from the country, he thought. This quietude.

Even so, he wondered idly what he might be doing at any of his three erstwhile hosts. Feeling stiff, no doubt, with Sophia and Lady Franklin, and Sophia’s husband, whose solicitousness set Francis more ill at ease than would outright hostility. At the Rosses’, a rumbling of feet in the wee hours of the morning, a bedroom door broken down by the Ross children, who cared very little for propriety where Francis was concerned, he who had once been nearly as permanent a fixture in their home as their parents. He loved them, in his way, and was glad for their clamor, even as he preferred to imagine it from afar.

And then, the Coninghams. Or, rather, James. And here Francis sighed, and began to rip a crust of toast into halves and thirds.

It was difficult to extricate himself from the memory of five years previous. How quickly he could imagine himself back there: arriving on Christmas Eve to a home trimmed with boughs of pine and holly, candles burning bright in every window. The Coninghams had welcomed them but gave them a wide berth all the same, as though they had been alerted in advance, or perhaps they simply knew James intimately enough to tell when to leave well enough alone. They spent most of the holiday sequestered in the parlour before a roaring fire, which James seemed determined to soak up, as though he could store the warmth of it inside himself and be assured of never again feeling cold.

“Are you happy, being here?” Francis asked him.

James had chewed on his bottom lip a moment before answering. “I am happy you are with me,” he said. “I think you should make me happy anywhere.” This struck Francis as a queer thing to say, particularly as James had seemed ill at ease and barely happy at all.

On Christmas night Francis had remained awake long into the wee hours, as was his habit in the years after their return. He had heard a clamor from James’s room across the hall, and had made haste to cross the corridor and get inside to quiet him before the whole house stirred. James had been acting out a nightmare; he stood on the bed as though to box some unseen assailant. He had thus become tangled in the bedclothes, and before Francis could intervene he tumbled from the four-poster onto the floor. When Francis neared him with the lamp James quailed and fought as though he did not know Francis, nor light, nor any sort of comfort.

“Peace,” said Francis, “Peace.”

And he lowered himself to the floor and gathered James into his arms there, head pillowed on his chest, stroking James’s hair from his clammy brow as though he was a fevered child. In time James had stopped shaking and settled into Francis’s embrace. Francis expected him to pull away, but James simply remained there until his breathing slowed, and Francis realized that he had fallen back to sleep. He sat with him for some time, unsure how to proceed, until at last he gave up and dragged the quilt off of James’s bed and over them both. He knew his joints would curse him for his folly in the morning, but at that moment it had seemed wholly preferable to rousing James.

He woke and at first did not know where he was, nor why James should be so close to him when they were neither of them cold enough to necessitate it, when they were safe in a townhouse in England with a fire in the grate burning to embers. Francis sat up, which stirred James and caused him to open his eyes, dark eyes which were so full of fear and in whose limpid depths Francis could spy his own distorted reflection. Francis had not wanted to see fear in James’s eyes, not when he had seen so damned much already. And so he had whispered the word again, _peace_ , and he had set his palm against James’s cheek.

“Francis,” James had murmured.

Francis had felt then an unfamiliar kind of certainty. Something was being offered him, something previously unconsidered, a thing of utmost lightness and delicacy. Thinking on it now he recalled the hawk enfolded in his greatcoat, the way it had gone so still as to have vanished, the way it had contained itself and then burst forth again under its own exquisite power.

But as the hawk winged away from him in his front garden, so the moment in the bedroom had fluttered past. Francis dropped his hand from James’s face and set it back into his lap. James smiled wanly, and made a weak joke, something about floorboards and their aging backs that Francis no longer remembered. They got up, gestured emptily at washbasin and door. Francis retreated across the hall to dress. They left Brighton the following afternoon, after a night that Francis had passed awake and pacing, his refractory movements matched by a second set heard faintly from across the hall. But they did not speak of it, and after some time it seemed to Francis as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

If he thought about it, it was after this that things had begun to stretch and thin between them. When he saw James henceforth, it seemed as though there were something painted over top of him, some false brightness that seemed to shift and shimmer as though it did not quite fit the James that moved beneath. But in the end one must take actions at their face value, and if Francis was surprised at James’s sudden distance, at his renewed predilection for London society, at his redoubled efforts to occupy the most fashionable spaces, indeed, at his impending memoir, then perhaps that surprise was misplaced. Perhaps he saw only a renewal of the James that had been pruned back by the Arctic, the way a climbing rose, when harshly trimmed, will roar back the following year denser of bloom and thorn.

* * *

Francis woke on Boxing Day to a curious slant of blue across the counterpane and a hideous, massing cold. As he stumbled from bed to stoke the ailing fire, he saw the bedroom window had been covered over with snow such that only a very little light might penetrate it. He knew not the time of the morning, and felt it appropriate to return to bed post-haste. He lit a lamp and read until he heard the church clock over the vale chime six, then seven, until at last he felt sufficiently fortified to go downstairs and set the kettle boiling.

By nine o’clock he was possessed of tea and another bun, and the fire, and his novel. He moved the armchair nearer the grate and pulled the woolen blanket over him. He had received a parcel from Ann Ross containing none other than a richly embroidered pillow of red velvet, and Francis stroked this like a cat as he read, and considered for a moment that he might like to have an actual living feline, to ward off mice and guard against marauding bird life. At some point he must have fallen asleep, because he woke to find the light had changed, blued again, and the blanket had slipped from his lap onto the floor. He rose to stoke the fire and to fetch himself another cup of tea. He had just set the kettle boiling and stood contemplating another bun when there came a resounding knock on the door.

Francis stilled. His initial feeling was one of irritation. He was padding about in slippers and a house-coat, having no reason to dress for out of doors. He had not looked in a mirror in he knew not how long, and his hair might be getting up to any mischief. He waited in the kitchen, hoping against hope that whoever it was might have made some mistake, and would depart shortly. But the road was nigh impossible to travel in the snow, and there were no adjacent neighbors. When the knock sounded again he sighed. He walked to the front of the house, combing his straggled hair back with rheumy fingers. 

“All right, all right,” he said. The intruder did not cease his knocking as he approached the door. It seemed also that he leaned to peer through the frosted window into Francis’s parlour, continuing to knock with an outstretched hand all the while. When Francis opened the door the poor fellow fell forward and tripped into the front hall, tracking some quantity of snow along with him. Francis was astonished to recognize James, looking hoary in a tweed traveling cloak, a hat lined in mink-fur pulled down low over his ears, a matching muff clutched in his hands. His face was a windburned pink, likely making him seem apple-cheeked to idle observers, but which reminded Francis all too well of their time on the shale. James’s hair curled from beneath the hat to trim his lined face, and a dusting of snow covered his shoulders. He made a noise like a blowing horse and began to stamp about in Francis’s doorway, shaking the snow onto the stone floor where it immediately began to melt.

“See here,” Francis said, unable to conjure any fresh emotion to replace his ire. “I’ll thank you to stamp on the other side of the threshold.”

James stepped dutifully backwards. “Christ, Francis. You’re alive.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“I waited and waited,” James said. “I must have worn a hole in the carpet in Will’s front hall, so often I walked to the door to peer out into the street.” James came into the house and removed his hat. He had been at the paper curlers again; not even the crush of the fur hat could flatten his hair, which fell about his shoulders in mahogany ripples.

“I don’t understand,” said Francis.

“I expected you Christmas Eve at the latest,” said James, his tone faintly accusatory. “Then I heard there was a great deal of snow falling” — here he gestured at himself— “so when you did not arrive I thought you waylaid by weather. Then came Christmas, and you were not forthcoming. I could no longer be contained in Brighton. I left this morning on the very first train. We only got as far as Hayward’s Heath, where I was forced to hire a driver. Great plodding draught-horse, could barely conjure a trot. And then I was dumped the next village over with no choice but to walk.”

“You walked here? Through the snow?”

“Five miles or so. I think you’ll find that I still have it in me.” James drew himself up.

“Never mind your physical fitness,” said Francis. “What ails your mind that you expected me to join you in Brighton, and that you should seek me out here when I failed to materialize?”

“You wrote me. You accepted my invitation.” James patted his pockets and withdrew an envelope Francis had last seen on his writing desk nearly a week ago. Worry curled through him as James began to read. “You open with a dig at recounting my cold, which I shan’t repeat,” he said. “Though I am glad you’re well. And then here, unless my eyes deceive me: ‘I would be pleased to join you at Christmas.’ Yet from the look on your face it seems my eyes do deceive me somehow. And to think how pleased I was to receive this reply, after seeing so little of you for so long. I was worried, Francis. You may not often agree to things but when you do you tend to follow through. I thought perhaps—” He shook his head. “Well. You are clearly hale as anything, and I am a perfect idiot for fearing otherwise.”

“Oh, God,” said Francis. He scrubbed at his face with his hands. He hoped fervently that he was dreaming this, that he was still asleep in his armchair by the fireplace. But when he moved his hands away James was still there, glaring at him. Having travelled such a long way, having—waited.

“I should hope you’ve a kettle on, if not something a damned sight stronger,” James said. 

“Yes, all right,” said Francis. “You had better come in.”

* * *

“So you forgot about my note,” James said. “Am I to understand that the alternative to your accidental acceptance was thus no reply at all?”

“I was distracted. There was—a bird in the house. It was very dramatic.”

They sat beside the fire, drinking tea. James also had a cup of gin at his elbow, from the bottle Francis kept for visitors. He was decimating a tin of biscuits, which had arrived in Ann Ross’s parcel. “A bird in the house. Is that some manner of euphemism?”

“No, James, it is not. It was a damned goshawk. Came straight through the kitchen window and broke several pieces of my good china.”

“You sound like a housewife,” James laughed. “Fussing over your crockery.”

Francis rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “I am a housewife. I am housewife and master both here in my little dominion.”

A grin played on James’s mouth. “And have you children?” he asked. He was running a fingertip around and around the rim of his gin. Francis thought he was paying considerably more attention to the one drink than the other, but he had an old drunk’s awareness of such things, and would not begrudge James his diversions.

“There is a pony in the shed, but he does not belong to me,” Francis said.

James nodded consideringly, as though Francis’s answer was entirely in earnest. “I suppose you’ve a goshawk.”

“I haven’t. It’s left me. Has no need of me any more.”

James sighed and took another sip. “Oh, Francis. You have made yourself quite a home here. If you must know, I am envious.”

“You cannot be envious. There is no Sussex Season, no finally appointed parlours to sip cocktails in. And do not take offence, but I do not think anyone in the village overly likely to read your memoir.”

James winced at the mention of the memoir. Curious. Francis would have expected him to preen. “This parlour is very finely appointed,” James said quietly. “Truly, you—you have a lovely home. Goshawks and all, I suppose.” He looked around the sitting room.

Francis had to admit the cottage had become, over time, very homey. It was small, verging on cramped, and it was old fashioned in nearly every way imaginable. But it was his. Francis loved to walk up the little staircase, set his feet in its worn cups of stone, feel along the wall where some places were smoother than others and imagine generations of hands steadying themselves with a tray in one hand, a basket of laundry or a child on a hip. To see James here stirred something unexpected in him, and he found himself speaking heedlessly.

“I did not forget your invitation,” Francis said.

“Oh?”

“I did not mean to mail it. I suppose I meant to finish it and send it along, to decline properly, only I never did. Perhaps there was some part of me that could not stand to do it. Part of me that thought—” Francis shook his head.

“Thought what?”

“That no more would follow,” Francis said, all in a rush. “We have not been thick as thieves these last years. You have been otherwise occupied.”

“And you have hidden yourself away,” said James. “We run in the same circles, Francis. It would not be difficult for you to see me, were you so inclined.”

I do not wish to see you in our _circles_ , Francis thought. And it is a half truth at best, that yours and mine are the same. He leaned forward and took up the poker, stabbing at the underside of a smoldering log. Damn James. Francis had managed to miss him so little when he was not here. Now that he was Francis could not help but feel keenly all James’s many absences, and yes, all the times Francis might have taken the initiative to end them, though he was so very bad at that, and particularly when he felt unduly wounded.

“Then we are both at fault,” he said, which was the best he could manage. James grunted but did not say anything further, and they retreated into silence for a time, James staring into the fire and Francis fiddling with the fringed border of Ann Ross’s pillow. He was still thinking of the memoir, which wriggled painfully toward the meat of his heart.

“I am sorry to have disturbed your Christmas, Francis,” James said at last. “I know how you value your solitude. I ought to have considered your letter more carefully and not allowed myself to race to my preferred conclusion.”

“Oh, think nothing of it,” said Francis. “You are here, and it cannot be undone.” He was aware of how he sounded, sour and grousing, but he found he did not care. James could take his prodding. He was all hot air and stuffing.

James laughed harshly, and shook his head. “You will never change. You and your endless morbidity. To be frank, I find your constancy reassuring.”

“God knows, James, I should never wish you to be other than frank with me. Least of all at Christmas.” And Francis stared pointedly into the fire again, thinking as he watched the flames snap and leap that the worst of it was he had changed, irrevocably so. He used to think James knew it, but now he was not so certain. Of the two of them it was James who was unchanged. Or, worse, changed and then changed back. Why James made him feel this way, like the grasping version of himself he had once been, was a mystery to Francis.

“I am worn out from traveling,” James said missishly. “ I hope you will not think me awfully impolite if I beg to take my leave of you early.”

“And where, pray tell, will you go?”

“Surely there is some inn in the village. I would not put you out.”

Francis rolled his eyes. “There is no inn in the village. There is barely a village in the village. No, you must stay here. Though I will not be so kind as to offer you the bed. My old bones beg seniority, and my joints are embrittled as anodes upon a hull.”

“I thought you were above cataloguing your ailments.”

Francis ignored him. “I will make up the sofa for you,” he said.

“No need.” James waved a hand. “I am young yet, and need only to draw my cloak over me. I shall be just as comfortable in your house as if I were spending the night on the train.”

“Suit yourself,” huffed Francis. But he located a spare quilt in the linen closet anyway, and left it on the armchair for James. A dare, rather than an offering.

* * *

Francis woke in the night in a sweat, the room nearly intolerably warm. His nightshirt was soaked and he had kicked the quilt off the bed entirely, and it was too tangled to right without clambering out upright and straightening quilt and sheet together. As he rose and changed his shirt he heard a muffled voice from without, and after ranging from thieves to ghosts and back in the span of a few seconds his mind alighted on the memory of James, whom he had left to his own devices several hours previous. Francis dumped his bedding on the mattress and went out onto the landing, from which he could see by the glow from downstairs that the fire had been stoked to roaring. He sighed and stepped back into his room to put his dressing gown and slippers on, and then took to the stairs, intent on admonishing James for attempting to burn the cottage down. When he came into the sitting room, however, he stopped, disarmed by the sight of his houseguest in some apparent distress.

James had stripped to trousers and a threadbare linen nightshirt, the top buttons of either fly undone as though he had been interrupted in the middle of undressing. He was holding a sheaf of papers, rifling through them and muttering to himself. The fire behind him licked eagerly from the grate, explaining the source of the unseasonable heat upstairs. James too was sweating, a gleaming film evident on his face and neck and the plane of his chest visible through his unlaced shirt. He was unmoved by the intrusion, merely nodding at Francis before continuing to sort through the mass of papers. The bottle of gin sat on an end table, looking blamefully depleted.

“Ah, Francis,” James said. “Have I woken you?”

“What the devil are you doing? Mean you to exhaust my stores of firewood in a single night?”

James looked back at the fire as though noticing its scale for the first time. “I say. It is rather an inferno, isn’t it? I suppose it got away from me.”

“Got away from you? You’ll have us both roasted to cinders. What has you so preoccupied, man?”

James cast his papers onto the sofa and fixed them with a look of bare loathing. “You interrupted me,” he said. “I was just about to burn my memoir.”

“Burn your—why, whatever would possess you?”

James began to laugh. Francis had never heard such a laugh from a man, save perhaps in his limited dealings with the mad. It was high and near hysteric, and it disturbed him utterly. He wished to clap his hands over his ears. “James, stop that at once,” he said. “And—and give me that, damn you. You are not in your right mind.” He grabbed for the memoir. James made little effort to hold onto it; in fact, he thrust it into Francis’s hands as though he knew he could not be trusted.

“I am shocked, Francis. I should think you would be the first to volunteer to help me cast this abomination into the fire.”

Francis supposed he had a point. By rights he ought to be overjoyed to see James abandoning the memoir. But although Francis did not consider himself an artist, he thought he was somewhat acquainted with the artistic temperament. He knew that one did not generally desire to throw something into a fire if one was indifferent to it. So he determined the memoir must be thus quite near to James’s heart, and yet for some reason he was ready to wrest it from his very breast and destroy it forever. Much as Francis hated the concept of the memoir, this somehow did not bear thinking about. 

“Do you love it?” he blurted.

James stared at him. “It both pains and delights me,” he said, after some time.

“Am I to understand the pain outweighs the delight?”

James sighed. “At present.” He held out his hand, gesturing for the memoir, which Francis clutched protectively. “Oh, give it here,” James said. “I shall grant it a stay.” 

Francis handed it back to him. James patted and sorted it into a neat pile and sat down on the sofa, placing the collated memoir on his undone lap, which he appeared to notice for the first time. “Apologies for my disarray.”

Francis sat beside him. “Do not think of it. I intruded upon you.”

“There are no intrusions in one’s own home.”

“Even so,” Francis said. Then, “Might I ask what your problem is with the memoir? Perhaps if you speak of your troubles with the thing the weaknesses will become more apparent.”

“It is all weakness,” spat James. “There is no stoutness to its scaffolding, no true beam in the whole of it.”

“Come, come. It cannot be so bad as that.”

James tossed his lank hair. “Do you know why I undertook to write it in the first place?”

“Why does any man write a memoir? Glory, fame, all the rest.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve got those,” James said. “What I do not have is money, Francis.”

“Preposterous. You had as much back pay as I, when we returned.”

“Which was no fortune, I might remind you. And were there not certain expectations of us? Returning heroes?”

“No one forced you to resign your commission. To take rooms where you did, nor to ascend immediately up the ranks of London’s most fashionable bachelors, nor to wine and dine half the city,” he said.

If he thought about it Francis could quote a score of society columns in which James had featured prominently. He had begun something of a collection, with the idle thought that he might one day show them all to James and have a laugh when he came to his senses. Eventually he had stopped when he realized he was doing little but stoking his own bitterness.

James sputtered. “I was alive. Such things made me happy. And I wanted to be happy, Francis. Would you begrudge me that?” 

“Of course not,” said Francis. “Only I recall our last Christmas together. If you will beg my pardon, James, you did not seem overly happy then.”

“I was making a stab at it,” James said. “As I have done all these years since. With limited success, but I have tried. Unlike you, it would seem, I have tried and tried, as I have tried to earn a damned wage. You did not know me before the expedition; I was in similar straits then between commissions, always strapped, always striving. I nearly married then, Francis, and again a year or so ago. That is how dire it was.”

Francis snorted. They both knew James was not the marrying kind. “Who was she? Surely no one so alluring that you’d not have gone back to sea first.” 

James drew in a sharp breath. He became immediately absorbed in stared at his hands, which shook faintly where they lay in his lap. When his gaze returned to Francis, his expression was all flint, and Francis realized his misstep. “You know I could not,” James said in a whisper. 

Francis reached for him and laid his hands over top of James’s. He held them there until the tremor stilled. “I know,” he said. “I know.” 

It was all too easy to forget now: the court martial, James’s promotion and subsequent appointment to another expedition. Not the North Pole this time, nor the South either; Francis could not even recall the place save that it was halfway around the world and that James had been distraught at the prospect, had come to Francis quaking with indecision over whether to resign or to accept the posting, though the thought of setting foot on board a ship again caused his guts to churn and his sleep to be shattered by nameless terrors. A great shame, Francis thought it privately, for one so promising as James. Yet he understood it. He had similar qualms when he imagined returning to sea, only he was more senior, his retirement more understandable. 

James appeared to calm somewhat under Francis’s ministrations. “She was the spinster daughter of some rear admiral,” he continued. “She did not love me but I thought we might have come to a mutual agreement. Her parents would not let her alone about marriage and she was eager to be shut of them. But in the end she found a more suitable prospect and we called it off.”

“I heard nothing of it.” 

And thank heaven for that. Even after the fact, the thought of James betrothed was repellent to him. James in a morning coat and hat at the head of an aisle, Francis sitting to one side. The music would swell, the congregation turn as one. Which would be worse, he wondered: to tear his eyes from James or to watch him as he looked upon his bride for the first time, to try and discern in his expression whether he married for love or for other reasons entirely, reasons which might in time come to rot his union from the center outwards? Francis could not fathom it. 

“She wished our suit to remain a secret,” James said, sounding chagrined. 

At once, Francis began to laugh. Mirth rolled through him like a tide and he found himself shaking with it, holding James’s hands and laughing almost until he cried. At first James looked affronted, but in time he seemed to find himself similarly afflicted. He smiled weakly and held Francis’s hand all the tighter. “What is so bloody funny?” he asked, though his tone was rather warm, his eyes gleaming.

“Only the thought of you as an undesirable match for a spinster. The handsomest man in Her Majesty’s Navy.”

“Damn your eyes, Francis Crozier.”

“Rotten luck you’ve had, my dear James.” He found he was rubbing small circles with his thumb over the back of James’s hand. “Only take heart in the fact you are still very handsome.”

“Rotten luck for both of us,” James said. “But I thank you.”

Francis smiled at him, though in the wake of his laughter there now intruded a measure of sadness. He felt as though he were a captain again, sitting a man down to break bad news. “I regret to inform you I am content,” he said. “Here in my little kingdom.”

“But you are alone.”

“Not now,” said Francis. “And not when I do not wish it.” 

Francis smiled to think of the times he did not wish it. When the weather was fine he would have James and Ann and their bevy of little Rosses, who would descend upon him with butterfly nets and flower presses and buckets they would fill with tadpoles. To welcome them he would feel, if not young again, then considerably less old, out in the fields until long past dusk, until he could stand with his arm around the eldest, a tall girl who loved stargazing, and could trace for her the sky he had learned by heart when younger than she. Commit these stars to memory, he would tell her. They are your truest friends. You may think yourself lost beyond all hope, but if you find them, they will ever steer you home. 

James was watching him as though he could read all that played behind Francis’s eyes. He shook his head slowly. “Perhaps this is why I have failed so utterly at my memoir,” he said. “I find that try as I might I cannot capture you. And as you are the very crux of it, my failure to render you correctly could be no greater handicap.”

“Why should I be the crux of your memoir?” 

“How could you not be? Were it not for you I should not be here to write the blasted thing in the first place. You saved me from myself out there in that void, Francis. I owe you all of it. I ought to burn this memoir and devote myself instead to writing your biography.” 

“Christ,” said Francis. “Not while I yet live, James, I beg you.” 

“The whole blasted thing,” James repeated, as though Francis had not spoken. He seemed thunderstruck. “Ever since the ships. A thorn in my paw I cannot extract however much I teethe at it. A great sea-scarred fish I cannot catch. A dream that flees my mind on waking. My heart has been tossed bow over stern in the roughest tempest, and here all along you have been happy.”

“You said once you thought I would make you happy anywhere,” Francis said.

James drew his hands over his face. “Not miles and years apart.”

Francis swallowed. The stifling air in the sitting room had the same gossamer quality as in the Coninghams’ spare bedroom just short of five years ago. Francis was ready. He would make his own offering. He slid one hand from its entanglement on James’s lap and cupped James’s cheek. His thumb, emboldened by its travels over the back of James’s hand, traced the thin, rosy bow of his lip.

“I have, by some stroke of providence, found myself mostly happy,” Francis said. “I am a certain kind of bachelor, James, set in my ways and recalcitrant. I cannot promise other than to try. But I would do so, if I thought you might stand a chance of being happy beside me.”

“There are bachelors and there are bachelors,” James said. “How certain are you?” 

“Quite,” said Francis. 

James’s eyes flashed, seemed to bore hot as coals into Francis’s as he caught Francis’s hand by the questing thumb and kissed him on the palm. “And you would abandon your quiet country life for me?”

“I would not,” said Francis. “You would be as the goshawk. You would sweep through my window and rattle my crockery. Alight in my tree from time to time.”

“Ah, from time to time,” said James. “And what if I should care to nest there?”

“Finish your memoir, James. We shall talk of nests in the spring, when all live things are fruiting and laying.”

James kissed him. 

In the morning they saw the hawk aloft, and in the frosted verge a bright-stemmed clutch of snowdrops.


End file.
